


If death is a doorway, I am gate seeker

by dwellingondreams



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Lily Evans Potter, Bittersweet, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Character Study, Dark, Death, Depression, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Female Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Lily Evans Potter Lives, Male-Female Friendship, POV Female Character, POV Lily Evans Potter, Post-Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter Friendship, Sirius Black & Lily Evans Potter Friendship, Sister-Sister Relationship, Sisters, Widowed, Young Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-09-29 02:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17194829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dwellingondreams/pseuds/dwellingondreams
Summary: "The sorrow birds find what is weak, my chest, beak-marked, my eyes long gone." - Ann V. DevilbissLily Potter is dead.No.Lily Potter should be dead.The cheerful little owl clock on top of the dresser hesitates, then ticks onward. The baby in the crib sucks in another eager breath, and wails anew. The dead girl on the floor- the should be dead girl on the floor- opens her eyes.(Lily lives, but sometimes wishes she hadn’t.)





	1. Chapter 1

Lily Potter is dead.

No.

Lily Potter _should_ be dead.

The cheerful little owl clock on top of the dresser hesitates, then ticks onward. The baby in the crib sucks in another eager breath, and wails anew. The dead girl on the floor- the should be dead girl on the floor- opens her eyes. She sees nothing but dancing black spots. She blinks again. The hardwood floor is cold and dusty underneath her. One would think a bomb had gone off in the little nursery. A gaping hole in one corner ushers in cold autumn air and the wind rattles the shattered window, glass clinking grittily.

Burn marks scour the walls. Plaster drifts down lazily from the battered ceiling like early snow. The almost corpse on the floor stares up at it, having stopped blinking, now uncomprehending. The baby’s wails grow louder like a siren, then fade back down to a low, hoarse series of sobs. The girl lying prone on the floor is covered in ash and dust, and her chest burns and burns. Her bare toes curl up reflexively. She still doesn’t understand, is still in shock, but instinct and adrenaline take over.

Lily Potter slowly, painfully, pulls herself up to a sitting position, grasping at the bars of the crib like a drowning man. Then she leans back against it. Her head pounds and throbs. She sucks in a rasping breath. She wants a drink of water more than anything. Her chest continues to burn. She limply scrabbles at her dressing gown, pulls down her thin camisole. Lighting sears down her chest, a brand slashing its way between her breasts. Her fingers trace its arc, and she flinches. 

“Mama,” the baby says insistently, having given up his sobbing, rooting his little hands in her hair through the bars. “Mama!”

“I’m here, baby,” says Lily reflexively, and then she realizes, like a stone sinking into water. The baby. Her baby. Harry. James. Him. She bolts up onto her feet, and wavers, the room spinning around wildly like a dark carousel. She braces herself on the crib and scoops up the baby with one arm, presses his warm body against her burning chest. He’s wet his pajamas but he still smells like her Harry, and she breathes in his baby scent, nose pressed against his dark curls. There is a scar on his forehead, raised and red, a miniature version of the one lancing down her chest. She doesn't care. He's here. He's alive. Her head is aching and her throat hurts and her chest burns and the room is finally slowing down but she can’t- she doesn’t- “James?” she calls out, only it comes out barely more than a whisper. Lily sucks in another breath and takes a timid step forward, legs weak and shaky. “James?”

The cottage answers with hollow silence, and as her initial shock ebbs away like the tide, reason begins to fill the gaps. She starts to remember. She remembers what they ate for dinner, she remembers watching the children in their costumes out the window, peering into the gathering dark, she remembers the cat purring on her lap, she remembers James laughing with Harry. She remembers James. She remembers James’ scream for her to run. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t run, there is an anti-apparition ward on the cottage, she didn’t have her wand. Her wand. Her wand is in their bedroom down the hall. And James. James is downstairs. Silent.

Lily stands there for a few moments, willing it not to be true. But she heard the curse. Heard him fall. She had already broken at that point, when she heard his body come crashing to the floor below. She had already given up hope of escape. And now- she doesn’t know what happened. She has always hated not-knowing, has always been curious, too inquisitive for her own good. But Voldemort was here- and now he is not. Only ashes remain and dust and the moaning wind remain.

She wants to fall to her knees but she can’t. She has to see it with her own eyes. Has to see him. Slowly, haltingly, she takes a few trembling steps, edging around the broken furniture and splintered wood and shattered glass, Harry sleepy and unknowing in her arms, and moves into the narrow hall. There are strange new shadows on the walls, on the stairwell. At the bottom of it lies James. Lily stares down at him for a few moments until a low groan escapes her, and she shakes her head and silently screams at him to get up, cry out, do anything-

But he is still. Harry pats at her wet cheek. “Da?” Lily quickly turns around, feeling lightheaded. She doesn’t want him to see. He wouldn’t understand even if he saw but she doesn’t want him to see. She steps away from the stairs, afraid she might collapse down them at any moment, and walks quickly into their bedroom, sets Harry down on the bed, snatches up her wand from the night table. If she’d had this maybe James would be alive. If she hadn’t been such a stupid, foolish girl-

She closes her eyes for a moment and Voldemort is in front of her again, and she is trembling with terror but she cannot, will not move, she has never known him to offer a reprieve before, cannot think why he would bother, why he didn’t kill her as soon as he entered the room. To draw it out, to bleed the wound a little more? All she knows is that it went wrong. Something went wrong. She knew what he was going to cast before he even raised his wand. She knew she was dead. But… she isn’t. 

Lily sits on the bed with her shaking hands clasped in her lap beside her half-asleep toddler, and bows her head as if in prayer, trying to block it all out. No. She needs to think. She can’t- James is gone but she can’t- Harry needs her. Her baby needs her. If she gives up now, gives into it all, her mind will shatter right here, and no one will be there to put her back together. She has to hold on a little while longer. More could be coming, looking for their master. They have to run. They have to get out of this house. 

She forces herself to stand, rummages through the wardrobe in the corner, doesn’t dare look at James’ things. She claws off her dressing gown and camisole and pajama bottoms and stands there haggard and naked in the moonlight, and then dresses. Bra, underwear, trousers, her thickest jumper. Who knows how long they might be outside for. She puts on wool socks and shoves her feet into her sturdiest boots, which she hasn’t worn since last winter. 

She pulls on her coat and scoops up Harry’s limp form, hurries down the hall and back into the nursery. No time to wrestle him out of his pajamas- she crunches broken glass underfoot and pulls out a pair of little shoes and a coat and hat, jams them onto his feet, bundles him in the coat, pulls the hat over his head. “Hold on to Mummy,” she tells him in a voice that does not sound like her own; it is cold and flat and dead. His little arms tighten around her neck; she needs one arm free for her wand.

It is time to face the stairwell and James once more. Lily pauses at the top, then steels herself and grips the banister, fighting back the inevitable tears. Don’t think, just move, she tells herself harshly. Just go. Take Harry and run. She walks stiffly downstairs like a soldier marching into battle, then stands before her husband’s body. He is lying on his side, his face turned away from her, but she can see the glint of his glasses. Lily chokes and coughs, every fiber of her being screaming to throw herself over him and scream until there is nothing left inside. But she has to go.

Lily moves around him, blinking furiously, and then the broken front door creaks on its remaining hinges. Someone is just outside. She doesn’t think much; she moves as she has moved in dozens of fights before this one, angles herself so she is shielding Harry, and raises her wand. She has never cast an Unforgivable before but there is a beast in her chest, screaming and screaming for something to sate it, and it will not be satisfied with a simple shield charm. And she has only one thing left to lose, and it certainly isn’t mercy.

“AVADA KEDAVRA!” she shrieks, and her Killing Curse sings out emerald green and true, and misses Severus Snape by a matter of inches, shattering the door frame even more. He flattens himself against the ruined door, face white with shock, and then they lock eyes. He looks like a man who has just seen a mirage in the desert. His lips move with her name.

Her next spell is not an Unforgivable, but it does send him flying into the front garden, where he skids across the damp grass, fumbling for his own wand. Lily steps out into the night air. Harry is wide awake and terrified now, clawing and scratching at her with his tiny nails, and she presses a hot kiss to his temple. “It’s alright,” she chants under her breath, “Mama’s got you, Mummy’s right here, love-” Another few yards and she will be able to apparate. 

She points her wand at Severus again as he scrambles to his feet, back against a wind-tossed oak tree. “You’re alive,” he rasps. He raises a thin white hand in supplication or warning or both. “Lily, you’re alive-,”

“Give me one reason not to kill you,” Lily says, and again she does not recognize the sound of her own voice. The beast is still snarling inside her _kill him hurt him rend him bleed him I want him dead I want them all dead look what he did to James my love I want them dead I want you back I’ll kill them all I swear I will come back darling I love you I want him dead I want him dead-_

“I’m not here to hurt you,” Severus says. “Lily, please-,”

“Then get out of my way,” Lily hisses. “Get out of my way, Severus, before I do it-,”

“I’m here to help you,” he nearly shouts it, but the night swallows up his voice, is on the verge of consuming both of them. His matted hair is falling into his gaunt face, and the circles under his eyes are more pronounced than ever. Lily last saw him nearly a year ago, but that was in battle, and only from a great distance. She had been trying to decide what she might say if it came down to the two of them, whether or not she should try, one last time, to bring him back to the light.

Now? Now it is not a question of bringing Severus back from a path he chose years ago. Now it is a question of whether or not she carves her own bloody path straight through his. She could do it. She could kill him. He would defend himself, might even kill her, but she knows she is his match in dueling. He’s weak. Lily has known she is an open sore for him for years now. His weakness for her will make him hesitate to land a fatal spell. She could kill him. Her weakness was always James and James isn’t here. Is he?

“Help me?” Lily can barely do more than utter it. She wants to laugh and cry and pull out her hair like a raving madwoman. She does not lower her wand. “He came. He came here tonight,” she rises to a scream once more, “he came and he-,” she can’t get the words out, they are stuck in her throat. “He-”

“He spared you,” says Snape, eyes alight with manic hope. “He did, he spared you-,” and then for the first time he glimpses the toddler bunched up in her coat, and shock ripples across his face. “But-,”

“He tried,” Lily whispers, “he tried but he failed. Your dark lord failed tonight. Harry’s alive. He’s gone. I don’t know where, but he’s gone,” her fractured tone takes on an almost lunatic edge. “He’s gone away and what will you do now, Sev? Go tell the others?”

“I have to tell Dumbledore,” he says blankly, and Lily sinks into stunned silence. Her wand wavers.

“Put your wand down,” Severus takes a step towards her. “Lily. I won’t hurt you, or- or the boy, I swear it. Put your wand down, and come with me.”

A queer laugh snarls in her mouth. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she half-chuckles, half-sobs. “Murderer. You think I don’t know what you’ve done? Monster. You stay away from me, or I’ll kill you, Sev. I will.”

She almost murdered him just minutes ago, so what does that make her? Lily does not think she would have wept, if she’d stepped over his corpse as she ran. She would not have even cared. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. None of this matters. Nothing matters but Harry. She has to get him somewhere safe. Hogwarts. It is the only safe place right now. The Fidelius Charm- she thinks briefly of Peter, and white hot fury courses through her veins. She would tear him apart with her bare hands, were he here. 

Severus takes another cautious step. “Lily. I’m working with Dumbledore. Let me take you to him. It will be safe there.” He stretches out his pale hand towards her. Lily considers it. Then her wand slashes it open with a nearly wordless curse, and she bounds past him, through the gate, onto the street, and whirls away with a crack like a gunshot, leaving him still grasping for her.

She reappears in Hogsmeade, having splinched off three of the fingernails on one hand, but Harry is unharmed. The streets are silent, the shops dark aside from the pubs, but she cannot risk entering either. Instead she runs, sprints across the cobblestones, head down against the wind and the rain sleeting down across the highlands, runs for the hilly dirt road leading up the castle. A figure in silvery white robes like a wraith meets her at the gates.

“Lily,” says Albus Dumbledore somberly, as she pants breathlessly in front of him, hunched over, Harry squirming in her arms. His tone is controlled but even she can see the shock in his bright blue eyes. He says something else but her ears are ringing terribly and the rain and wind are howling around her and all at once the wet earth rushes up to meet her and there is merciful silence once more.


	2. Chapter 2

Lily wakes to the setting sun and a too-small bed. After a few baffled moments, she realizes it is a cot, and that the airy, dimly lit room she is in is the Hogwarts infirmary. Through the high windows she can make out the encroaching dusk. The infirmary is almost empty, aside from two whispering children at the far end, who keep shooting furtive glances her way. There is silence aside from the faint tolling of a bell and the distant sound of footfall.

Lily has not been back to Hogwarts since her graduation three years ago. It feels more like three decades right now. She can’t remember the last time she was in the infirmary- visiting James when he was laid up after a brutal quidditch match, perhaps. James. Then she remembers all over again, and her breath hitches in her throat, and she struggles to sit up. Where is Harry? Where is her baby?

One of the little girls makes a squealing noise, swatting at the other, who calls out, “Madam Pomfrey, she’s awake, Madam Pomfrey-,” and flits into the office at the far end of the room, the other on her tail. Lily supposes they can’t be that young, but now that she has a child of her own- where is he- her head swirls again and she digs her nails into her palms, trying to control her breathing. She’s safe at Hogwarts, so Harry must be safe too. Dumbledore wouldn’t let any harm come to him. 

Her coat and shoes have been removed, but she’s still wearing the clothes she put on… last night? Has it been longer? How long was she unconscious? What’s going on? Has Voldemort returned? Where did Severus go? What about the Order? She has too many questions, all gnawing at her anxiously, and under that anxiety is the swelling tide of shock and grief. She can’t think about it. She just can’t. She needs to see Harry. She needs to speak with Dumbledore.

The brisk click of heels makes her look up suddenly, and she sees Madam Pomfrey, the school nurse, Dumbledore, and McGonagall, who has a bundle in her arms, swiftly approaching. “Harry,” Lily gasps, and tries to stand up, but Madam Pomfrey is immediately bustling at her side, firmly pushing her back down onto the rumpled cot.

“That is quite enough of that, Miss Evans-,” she hesitates then, as if recalling that Lily is no longer a student and is in fact married, but her grip remains strong. “You need your rest. You’re in no state to go running about anywhere-,”

Lily brushes her off impatiently, reaching for Harry, who is fast asleep. Minerva McGonagall meets her anxious gaze with a pained look of her own, and looks as though she wants to say something, but isn’t sure what, instead glancing to Dumbledore, who is smiling faintly, sadly. “I trust you’re feeling better,” he says to Lily, as she holds Harry close and breathes him in once more. “You’ve been asleep since last night.”

“Is Harry alright?” Lily demands, gaze flitting down to the scar on his forehead, and then thinking of her own scarring. But it doesn’t matter. She’s fine. She will be fine. It’s going to be fine-

“He was quite upset at not being able to see his mother today, but aside from that, he’s in perfect health,” Dumbledore says after a moment. Madam Pomfrey, sensing the need for privacy, has moved off, ostensibly murmuring about getting Lily something to eat, although she doesn’t feel hungry, only weak and a bit light-headed.

“How much do you recall of last night?” Dumbledore asks as Lily calms some, laying Harry’s limp form in her lap. His gaze is as unreadable as ever, although he remains quite calm. McGonagall looks quite agitated in contrast, her gaze continually flashing from Lily to Harry to Dumbledore, lips almost moving.

“The Fidelius Charm broke,” Lily says, as if answering a question in class, something she was always good at it. She closes her eyes for a few moments, fighting back the fury. “Peter betrayed us.”

“Peter?” McGonagall whispers in shock, and Lily opens her eyes to see both of the professors staring at her. Then she realizes. They think the secret-keeper is Sirius. 

“We thought it would be best to have Peter,” she says quickly, “because everyone would assume we would choose Sirius. He agreed, but-,” she doesn’t know what to say. Peter- Lily was never as close with him as she was with say, Remus, but he was still like a brother to her. To think of him going to the other side- what could they have possibly offered him? Protection? Power? And he had been the one who-

She remembers one of his dark conversations with Sirius, regarding Remus, and the spark of outrage is kindled ever brighter. How dare he. How dare he have insinuated that they had reason to distrust Remus, when all along it was him, him, when he was there every step of the way, at their wedding, holding Harry in his arms- that she could ever have allowed him to-

Lily snaps out of it in time to see the look shared between Dumbledore and McGonagall. “We will need to inform the aurors of this immediately,” Dumbledore says. “Sirius and Peter are both presently unaccounted for, you see.”

Her heart thuds painfully. “What about Remus?” The last she had heard, he was going north on Order business, but…

“Remus has been informed,” Dumbledore replies. “I sent him to fetch your sister here, as a matter of fact.”

Lily almost shrieks with hysterical laughter at the idea of Remus, who she always regarded as a brother from another mother, the werewolf, being sent to ‘fetch’ Petunia. Vernon will kill him, or at least make his usual threats. Petunia… She doesn’t want to think about her older sister right now. She reaches up and runs trembling fingers through her tangled hair. She probably reeks of sweat and mud. She wants to soak in a hot bath. She wants to wake up and find this was all some horrific nightmare. But it’s not. 

“Peter broke the Fidelius Charm,” she continues shakily, “and You-Know-Who- and Voldemort came. He…” her eyes well up with tears again, and she sobs helplessly. McGonagall lays a hand on her shoulder. “He killed James.”

“I’m very sorry, Lily,” Dumbledore says gravely, although he must have known. “What you’ve been through is unspeakable. But if my suspicions are correct… Voldemort attempted to cast the Killing Curse on both you and Harry, did he not?”

Lily nods silently, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. “He- he told me to step aside. He- it was as if he wasn’t going to kill me, if I just let him…” She can’t even say it. That’s the unspeakable part. The idea of her- of any mother- stepping aside in that moment. How could she? Why would she? Harry is her life. She would do anything for him. She would rather die a thousand painful deaths than let any harm come to him. 

“But I didn’t, and I didn’t have my wand, and he… he cast the Killing Curse. And it hit me, I felt it, but there was this terrible burning pain, and then I… I woke up on the floor, and Harry was crying, but he was alright, and Voldemort was gone.”

McGonagall has gone quite white, but Dumbledore doesn’t look shocked, only… troubled. “Love is a more powerful magic than any of us can hope to understand,” he says eventually. “I cannot speak to exactly what happened last night, Lily, but… It seems your sacrifice to save Harry countered the Killing Curse not once, but twice.”

“How is that possible?” Lily asks hollowly. “I don’t… I don’t understand, Professor. What happened to Voldemort? Is he… dead?” She feels stupid asking it, but she doesn’t see what other explanation there could be. He wouldn’t have simply left after attempting to massacre her entire family.

“The Voldemort you have been fighting for these past several years is gone,” Dumbledore says, blue eyes glinting in the lamp light. “Dead in the sense we are most familiar with… perhaps not. But defeated, yes. For now.”

“He could come back?” McGonagall asks sharply.

“He may try, what little of him that remains,” Dumbledore clasps his hands in front of his spotless robes. “But the greater threat to the wizarding world has been vanquished for the time being. His supporters have scattered. All of magical Britain spent much of today in a state of rejoicing, even the Ministry. It would seem Harry… and you by extension, Lily, are something of newfound celebrities.”

Lily doesn’t give a damn about that. All she cares about is that Death Eaters aren’t about to burst in through the windows and try to murder her child. It’s over then. The war. She’s spent years imagining this moment, had even at times discussed with James what they would do when it was truly over, but… She could never have imagined this. The idea of one or both of them losing their lives isn’t so foreign, but she’d never… Not like this. 

She had a family. She had a home. She hadn’t felt that sense of belonging, that sense of peace, not since her mother died when she was fourteen. Not since her father died when she was nineteen. Not since she and Petunia stopped speaking in person to one another, and only communicating via terse letters exchanged during holidays. And now all that’s been ripped away, like some sort of cruel joke. She has nothing left besides her son. 

Madam Pomfrey comes back with a tray full of food from the kitchens for her, and Dumbledore and McGonagall take their leave, after McGonagall transfigures a nearby chair into a small crib for Harry. Lily stares at the meal in front of her, the smell of the meat making her vaguely sick. She tries to pick up her fork and drops it, flinching at the sound. What is wrong with her? She’s acting like a terrified little girl. She has to be strong. Harry needs her. 

But all she can do it sit there, numb and paralyzed, watching her food grow cold. She’s not sure how long it is- ten minutes? An hour? But then the door to the infirmary bangs open, and Lily looks up quickly to see a familiar figure stalking towards her, starched coat and pantyhose and blonde perm and all. “Petunia?” she doesn’t so much say her sister’s name aloud as mouth it in shock, but there she is, Petunia, in the flesh.

Lily hadn’t actually expected her to go along with Remus- or anyone, really, bringing her to Hogwarts, of all places. But her sister is here, expression thunderous and moving as if she expects to be attacked by wild animals at any moment, but here all the same. She reaches Lily’s bed and glances from Harry’s crib to her and says tightly, “What in God’s name have you gotten yourself into now, Lily?”

And Lily bursts into tears, because part of her might loathe her older sister with her cruel dismissals and her dirty looks and her overall rejection of everything magical, everything that makes Lily who she is, but Petunia is still her sister, the girl she grew up squabbling and playing with, and despite everything they’ve said and done to one another, she did come. 

“You came,” she says between shuddering sobs, “Tuney-,”

Petunia is flushed scarlet and bristling, but she sets down her new purse on the nightstand and gingerly sits on the edge of the bed beside Lily, and when Madam Pomfrey comes out of her office, snaps, “Make yourself useful and get her some tissues, then! Good lord, what is wrong with you people-,” but she wraps a stiff arm around Lily’s heaving shoulder as she unravels all the same. 

“James is dead,” Lily manages to get out at one point, as Petunia, pursing her lips, dabs at her face with the newly acquired tissues. “And the cottage is… it’s all gone, Tuney.” Her sister doesn’t know about the war, doesn’t know about anything, really, aside from what she’s been told by Remus and Dumbledore, but Lily is in no state to summarize the past three years for her.

For a few tense seconds her sister says nothing, until Petunia exhales sharply. “Then I suppose you and the boy will have to spend a few nights at Privet Drive.” Lily just looks at her warily. Her sister is not quite scowling, and avoiding eye contact, something she always did when they were small. “I… You don’t have to do that, Petunia.” She takes a deep breath. “I know how you feel about- about me, and my life, and- I couldn’t ask you to-,”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Petunia snaps. “You’re not asking, I’m telling, Lily Jane Evans. I’m your sister, aren’t I?” She hesitates for a split second, and then goes on in the same snappish, insistent tone, “I might not agree with- well, whatever it is you’ve gotten mixed up in, but it’s over now, isn’t it? You’re a wreck. You’ve got a funeral to plan. You can’t be roaming around like a gypsy with a one year old baby,” she sniffs as if to emphasize her point. “So you’ll have to stay with Vernon and I for a little while. Nothing permanent, mind you-,”

Lily interrupts her with an embrace, and Petunia trails off. “Thank you, Tuney.”

She doesn’t just mean for the offer. Lily knows her sister very well. Petunia is every bit as stubborn and unyielding as her. She just applies the pressure in different ways. Whereas Lily rarely gives up, Petunia rarely gives in. It can’t have been easy for her to swallow her pride like this, and Lily does know something about that, as much as she might hate to admit any similarities between them. 

“There’s nothing to thank me for, you silly girl,” Petunia mutters, patting her briskly on the back. “Now for the love of God, eat your dinner.”


	3. Chapter 3

Lily sees Remus briefly before she leaves Hogwarts for Privet Drive with Harry and Petunia. It feels almost surreal to be walking through the halls with him again, as if they were sixteen once more, consumed with all the drama of school life and commiserating over homework and the looming threat of NEWTs. It might seem odd, but in a sense Lily befriended Remus even before she first went out with James. In him she’d found a kindred spirit of sorts. 

Remus is a bit less awkward and withdrawn than he was in Hogwarts, but he still towers over her, all gangly limbs and hunched shoulders, and Lily isn’t a particularly short woman. His light brown hair is already starting to go grey, although the silvery streaks could pass for blonde highlights for now. Lily wouldn’t be surprised if she woke up tomorrow and her hair was pure white. Don’t they say that happened to Marie Antoinette? Before her head was chopped off?

It was Remus who she confided in about her mother’s slow, agonizing death, two years after the fact. His mother, a muggle like her own, died when he was twelve. A stroke, not cancer, but like Lily, he was left with a grieving widower of a father and a house that seemed both too quiet and far too empty. It was Remus who half-convinced her to give James a chance, the summer before seventh year, lounging around in his garden, reading together in a hammock.

In Remus Lily found the brother she had always sought out in Severus. They occupied the same comfortable wavelength, had the same sense of humor, enjoyed the same sort of books and music and hazy afternoons lounging about in the sun, content to wrinkle like fruit. Lily had guessed what Remus might be in her third year, but she never said it aloud until they were seventeen.

“A werewolf,” she’d said, her back up against a tree his grandfather planted, carefully rolling a joint. She’d half suspected they were only having this question because he was high- Remus was always exceedingly private, which Lily, who’d spent most of her teen years cringing at herself for oversharing yet again, could respect and sometimes envy.

“I hope you’re not too scared,” he’d rolled over onto his side in the long grass, the breeze tickling both of their faces. “I don’t bite- well, almost never.” He’d hacked out a laugh then, and she’d looked at the shadows under his tired eyes. “But I think you knew that already,” Remus had murmured. “Am I wrong?”

“I could never be scared of someone who I once caught singing Mrs. Robinson in the shower,” Lily had said faux-sweetly, and stuck her teenaged tongue out for good measure. “What a fine monster.”

“The finest.”

Now she steps out into the twilight of the courtyard beside the finest monster she’s ever known, and burrows into her coat. Remus looks at her, torn and wavering in the half-light, until he sees her eyes and wraps a brotherly arm around her, pulling her close with a rough, comforting squeeze. “I should have been there.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Lily rests her head against the chest of his worn-out trench coat. “You had no way of knowing. None of us did.” She wants to cry again, but she can’t. She shed all her tears three hours ago with her sister. She’ll have to wait until she fills up again. Her dinner is roiling in her gut, but she knows she needs to eat, needs to keep her strength up. Her immune system is probably in a horrid state from being cooped up in the same little house for the past year.

“If I can’t blame myself, neither can you,” Remus says bitterly, and then digs his bony fingers into her shoulder blade as if to make his point. “D’you hear me, Lil? This isn’t your fault. You did the only thing you could do. James-,” he stops himself as if on the edge of a cliff.

“You can say his name,” Lily whispers. She will grant Remus that privilege tonight. James regarded him as the exasperated older brother he needed but didn’t deserve. 

“James would understand,” Remus continues haltingly. “Whatever happens, know that. He would never blame you for anything. You and Harry were his world.”

And James and Harry were her world, and now half her world has been obliterated. It’s like a house with no floor, and with every step she risks plummeting deep into the center of the earth. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that something so freshly constructed should be destroyed. They didn’t have enough time. She didn’t tell him everything she wanted to. They didn’t get to do everything they wanted to. It’s not fair. She’d already lost both her parents, and he his. It’s supposed to balance out. 

“I hope Sirius doesn’t do anything stupid,” Lily says after a few moments. It’s not the first time she’d said this, but it’s the first time it’s been said in this context. With one friend hunting down another. Remus is good at comfort, in his own ungainly way. He’s like a warm mug of something, tea or soup or hot chocolate, or a blanket that smells like your mother or dog. Sirius is good at justice, or whatever his latest concept of it is. He approaches getting even the way a burgeoning rocker might, all glistening teeth and Adam’s apple bobbing in his tattooed throat.

“He shouldn’t have gone after Peter,” Remus scowls; she peers up at him, squinting in the darkness. “Does he think Peter’s going to hang around for a fight? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was halfway across Europe by now.”

Lily almost hopes he isn’t. She almost hopes he tries something, almost hopes he would materialize right here and now, so she could look him in the eyes while she gouges them out. She shouldn’t be thinking this way, but anger is far, far easier than grief, and it’s more invigorating than tiring. You cannot be compelled to break a Fidelius Charm. He wasn’t imperiused, wasn’t tortured. Threatened, maybe, but they’ve all been threatened every day of their lives since graduation. 

As if Lily never worried about Death Eaters tracking down Petunia, never had nightmares about the Dark Mark hovering over Cokeworth. In a sense it was almost a blessing in disguise that her sister wanted nothing to do with her. That kept her safe. Marlene McKinnon’s entire family was slaughtered two weeks before Harry’s first birthday, all because her and one of her brothers were Order members. All of them. Her youngest brother was only fifteen. 

Lily was good friends with Marlene. They’d killed most of them quick. Not her. She had the prettiest hair, a golden mane flecked with copper, and the sort of grin that made you impulsively smile back. Nothing scared a girl like Marlene McKinnon, who rushed headlong into life and laughed like a maniac and saw the Sex Pistols in concert with Lily in Manchester. And she died in her own childhood home, broken and bloody and burned on the living room floor.

“We’ll see soon enough,” she says, instead of screaming bloody murder into the night, which is what she wants to do. Then, “I’m going to stay with my sister for a bit. Just until I can… sort things out. I don’t know. I’ll write you about… the funeral. When it’s time.” She scuffs the ground with one shoe pensively the way she used to when she was fifteen. Ignores the tide swelling in her once more. 

“Stay safe,” Remus says seriously, although they’ve said that sort of thing to each other for years now, and it doesn’t really matter anymore, anyways, since they’re saying on the radio that the war is over. Like it was a particularly bad storm, and now all the debris can be neatly swept away. Like it’s already beginning to seem like a bad dream. 

“Love you,” Lily presses a dry kiss to his stubbled cheek, but it reminds her too much of James, who’d needed a shave yesterday morning, when he was still here, and she’s wracked with a silent sob as she turns away. She’ll never kiss James again. Never hold him, never feel his heart beat in her eardrum, never entwine herself with him in bed in the morning, never have sex with him again, never wake up beside him in the morning-

She is grateful for Petunia because it takes her mind off of James. They take the Knight Bus from Hogsmeade to Little Whinging. Petunia has never ridden it before and goes incredibly green, digging her nails into Lily’s wrist the entire time, and it’d be almost funny if not for everything else. Harry wakes up from all the movement, but is miraculously quiet, nuzzling his head into Lily’s neck as she and Petunia totter off, faced with a neat little suburban street of bright streetlights and immaculate landscaping.

Lily has never seen Petunia and Vernon’s home before this, but she isn’t surprised by what she finds. Petunia and her grew up in Cokeworth, a solidly working class family, a cramped, rundown little house that looked even more rundown after Mum died. They were never poor, never on the level of the Snapes, always just barely keeping their heads above water, but they certainly weren’t Privet Drive worthy, either. Lily grew up dreaming of wide open spaces, wind tossed fields and rosy brambles and overgrown gardens. Petunia grew up dreaming of this; shuttered in safely middle class normalcy, neat fences and walls and perfectly trimmed hedges and a paved driveway that wasn’t cracked in a million places. 

Of course, the piercing screams of the baby inside the house do put a pit of a blemish on things. Vernon has been up with a screeching child for likely the first and last time in his life, and has drunken himself cherry red to boot, in lieu of any bottle feeding or comforting. Lily feels like a runaway teenager returned home, as Petunia and her husband nearly work their way up to a screaming match, then, ever mindful of what the neighbors might overhead, wind themselves back down.

Lily has only ever seen pictures of her nephew before. Dudley is a plump toddler with Petunia and their father’s straw blonde hair and pale blue eyes. His screaming finally settles once Petunia has him in her arms, cooing under her breath, and Lily shares one venomous stare with Vernon, who is glowering at her from a corner of the kitchen. “I don’t like this,” he begins to growl, but Petunia waves a hand at him angrily, and leads Lily upstairs.

The guest bedroom is small, but still bigger than the room Lily shared with Petunia for eleven years of her life. She has no clothes or toiletries so she has to share with her sister once more, and she feels like a child in a top that’s too tight in the shoulders and arms and bottoms that are too short in the legs. “I’ll go back to Godric’s Hollow soon,” she tells Petunia, who looks vaguely ill at the site of Lily in her clothes, as if it’s a nightmare come to life. “To get some of my things, and Harry’s.”

“Well, don’t expect me to tag along,” Petunia says sharply. “I’ve spent far too much time away from Dudley as it is.”

“Are you coming to the funeral?” It comes out flatter than Lily meant it, and Petunia freezes. She’d loathed James just as much as Lily had loathed Vernon. But if it was Petunia, if their situations were reversed, Lily would have come to the funeral, and they both know it. “You don’t have to,” Lily says angrily, although she manages to keep her tone hushed. “I know you hated him, it’s fine-,”

“I-,” Petunia seems about to say quite a lot about whether or not she hated James, but for once she holds her tongue. “I’ll come,” she says, even with her nostrils flaring and her eyes narrowed nearly to slits. “I- for you. What would people think, if none of your family were there? It’s unseemly.”

“Don’t come for the sake of my reputation,” Lily snaps; she can’t help it. “Trust me, Petunia, it’s not-,”

“I said I was coming,” Petunia cuts her off coldly. “And I am. You’ll need someone to look after the boy, and I wouldn’t trust any of those…,” she trails off, perhaps having sensed that ‘freak’ is not the right word, at least not right now, not when Lily is on the verge of crying out of anger, rather than grief. “I hope you at least intend to hold it in a church,” she settles on, primly.

“At St. Jerome’s, yes,” Lily brushes her hair out of her face, shoulders sagging. Petunia turns to go, their conversation over, but Lily reaches out and grabs her shoulder. “Tuney, wait.”

Her sister stiffens, but she’s not scowling or glaring when she turns round. “What?”

“I need you to cut my hair.” She can’t stand it anymore, no more than she can stand the rest of her body, which feels frail and weak and liable to shatter at any moment, like fine china. Lily has never been a fragile, delicate girl. She has always been iron-willed, and she shed her thin skin years ago. 

Now she wants to shed it once more, and nothing feels more airy and tenuous than her long hair, nearly to her waist. The last time she had it cut, James did it, and made a proper mess of it, hacking it to her shoulders all uneven and rough, at that. But they laughed after she was done yelling, and she still shivered with pleasure when he ran his fingers through it.

“Alright,” Petunia says immediately, without question or complaint, as if she does understand this need to purge, at least, and goes in search of a pair of scissors, and Lily loves her a little more for it.


	4. Chapter 4

Lily holds the funeral on the 5th, after Sirius is finally released from two days of questioning. Peter is missing, possibly dead. All they found was a finger, and the twelve dead muggles he murdered when Sirius finally caught up to him. Lily would rather not think about it. She hopes Peter is dead, of course. Not just because she wants him dead, because he may as well have killed James himself, but because she wants an end to the whole thing. A clean break. No loose threads.

But a funeral is nothing if not a collection of loose threads, a frayed mass of unruly stitches and sagging buttons. Lily schedules the service for the morning, because the days are so short and dreary now. The sun does make an appearance, bright and clean and overpowering in the greyish white sky. Lily sits in the little dusty chapel she was married in two years ago, wedged in between her stone-faced sister and her husband’s best friends.

There are no drawn-out speeches or reflections. Those are for men who die peacefully in their beds or favorite chairs, like her father. Those are for men who had the chance to experience manhood. James was twenty one. Barely more than a boy. He was a wonderful father and a loving husband, but he had so little time to grow into himself. Lily feels just as cut off at the stem. Aborted. Like a burned out, scarred field, where nothing else will be able to grow for some time now.

Lily’s hair is chin-length now, a bob that would be neat if her auburn locks ever lay straight, but she likes it. Likes the momentary feeling of foreignness when she looks at herself in the mirror. The other Lily, who had a husband and a home, is dead and will be buried with James. No one is tactless enough to remark on it. James was always popular, but the funeral is small and private and at one point Sirius gets up to help Emmeline Vance throw out Rita Skeeter, who is lingering outside waiting for a chance to pounce.

When he takes his seat again he whispers something about threatening to really earn some time in Azkaban, and Lily smiles thinly in spite of herself. She got word last night about the Longbottoms. Alice was always so sweet, and Frank was her favorite prefect for years. They were the sort of people so mild-mannered that you were surprised to find out they’d been Gryffindors and surprised to find out they were hardened aurors. And now they are as close to dead as one can be while still breathing. Shells of what they once were.

Lily suffered her first Cruciatus Curse when she was eighteen. It was delivered by Bellatrix Lestrange. Lily remembers searing pain, like her skin was being melted off her, and a high stream of laughter, and then the curse broke because Kingsley Shacklebolt had just launched a table across the room and into Lestrange and her husband. They’ve both been taken into custody now. The trial’s set for the end of the month. She’s not sure she’ll be able to stomach it.

She drops the first handful of dirt onto James’ coffin, and then wedges enough loose soil into Harry’s chubby fist, before he drops it, uncomprehending. He has been asking after his da, but there are no answers he would understand. He’s fifteen months old. Lily doesn’t think she knew what death really was until she was five and her favorite rabbit that lived in their back garden was killed by a fox. She can tell him that his daddy has gone, but Harry doesn’t know that means he isn’t coming back. Can’t come back. If James could fight his way back into this world he would, she’s sure of it, he would. But that’s not how things work. There are ghosts, to be sure, but that’s not for James. He would never want to stay like that, all grey cold vapor.

Besides, there is still enough Petunia in Lily that she was never entirely comfortable around Hogwarts’ many ghost. It always seemed so cruel, to chain yourself to a certain time and place. Lily is afraid of many things, but her own death was never one of them, not until she had James and Harry. And then it was the terror of leaving them behind, her own selfish desire, her possessiveness. It wasn’t some sort of noble, virtuous urge to fly fearless in the face of death.

The grave fills up quick enough, and Lily retreats into the crowd of mourners, only glimpsing a flash of yellow as Remus conjures up unseasonal sunflowers to lay at the headstone. JAMES F. POTTER. BORN MARCH 27th, 1960, DIED OCTOBER 31st, 1981. She has it marked as such because James always hated his middle name as much as his father hated his own name. LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER. _The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death._ 1 Corinthians 15:26. She always liked that verse from Sunday school. One of very few.

A cold wind cuts across the cemetery, and Lily blows a few errant strands of hair out of her eyes and adjusts Harry’s bright blue cap. It seems too cheerful for this, but they don’t really make baby clothes in black or grey. Her own dress, tucked away under her long coat, is borrowed from Petunia and too tight in the bust. Petunia thinks she should have worn a veil, but Lily doesn’t care. She’s not even wearing lipstick. Let them see her chapped lips and her swollen eyes. 

Sirius finally approaches her as the first people being to trickle out. He looks like a guilty schoolboy, his lank hair falling into his eyes. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. Instead he reaches out and rubs Harry’s back, who giggles and reaches for him. Lily shifts her grip on him, her arms aching. “Go ahead.” She hands him over, and Sirius slings him on his own hip with practiced ease. 

“Nice day for a funeral,” is all he can say. Lily’s not offended. They’ve been to funerals together before. If James were here, he’d be spewing gallow humors left and right. He’d expect nothing less at his own. 

“Could be better,” she replies, and then adds, “You look like you need a drink.” She knows she does, but she’s not yet at the point of breaking into the Dursley’s liquor stores.

“That’s the plan,” he sings under his breath, then looks her in the eyes for the first time. His eye and nose are wet, like a dog’s. “I should have killed him.”

“I don’t want to talk about Peter right now,” Lily is trying to ignore the sear of Petunia’s stare from yards away, where she is pointedly ignoring the witch trying to make conversation with her.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius shakes his head as if a gnat is buzzing around him. “Look- I don’t…,” his voice cracks the way it used to when he was seventeen and drunk. “I don’t know what to say, Evans.” He never dropped her maiden name, and she’s always been oddly grateful for it, even if she is a Potter now, irrevocably. 

“Then don’t say anything, just be here,” she hisses under her breath, because he already looks prepared to hand Harry back over and vanish into the crowd. When Sirius doesn’t know what to do, he runs. And she’s not sure where there is left for him to run. “Sirius, please.”

“Moony won’t speak to me.” He tickles the underside of Harry’s chin. 

“Then just talk to him. He loved James just as much as you do. Whatever was going on before-,” Lily cuts herself off abruptly. She’s not going to repair months of suspicion fueled by Peter’s manipulations in one day. “Don’t be a stranger,” she adds definitively. “Harry will miss you too much.” 

Harry smiles and says too loudly, “See-rush,” as if to prove her point. She takes him back from Sirius, who looks at her and then wraps her in a tight hug, locking his arm around her neck like an older brother and pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“I’ll try.”

Afterwards she returns with Petunia to a painfully quiet house on Privet Drive. Vernon is still at work, and Harry and Dudley are both down for naps. Petunia makes a pot of tea, and Lily is slightly touched when she hands her a cup, even if she prefers chamomile. “We’ll be out by next week,” she says, after a few sips. “I know I promised only a few days, Tu, and it’s been five.”

Petunia seems torn between agreeing with her and something else, her grip tightening on her own cup as she stares down at her freshly polished table. “Where will you go?” Her tone is slightly accusatory, as if she suspects Lily is going to set up camp in the nearest park and live out a caravan for the next decade.

“We’ll stay with Remus or Sirius for a bit until I find a new house,” Lily murmurs. At the very least, she doesn’t have to worry about money. James’ inheritance was enough that he wouldn’t have had to work for the rest of his life, if he was careful with his spending. Of course, he never was, having grown up spoiled rotten, with all the best toys and clothes and equipment a young wizard could want. She’d loved him in spite of it, but she’d always been the one to handle the money. James would have run through it all by the time Harry was twenty if left to his own devices.

Petunia looks up at that, eyes narrowed. “Lily, you _can’t_. What would people think?”

Lily frowns. “Think what?”

“They’re both bachelors and you’re a new widow,” Petunia hisses. “It’s inappropriate.”

Lily chokes out a laugh around another mouthful of tea, although she grimaces. It tastes a bit off. Too much sugar? “Tuney, that’s far from the most inappropriate thing I’ve ever done-,”

“Of course,” Petunia rolls her eyes. “How could I forget? You spent most of your time home having the run of Cokeworth with that Snape boy, doing God knows what-,”

Lily sets her cup down too hard, saucer rattling, green eyes flashing, and Petunia clamps her mouth shut abruptly, seeming to have realized she’s overstepped. “For your information,” Lily snaps, “I didn’t spend my summer holidays sleeping with Severus, Petunia, if that’s what you’ve been wondering all these years. We were friends. But I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Petunia’s cheeks flush red as if she’s been slapped, and Lily feels a flare of guilt all the same. Her older sister had never had an easy time making friends, or keeping them. From what she remembers, Petunia spent most of their teenaged years home, doting on their father or locked up in their room, writing in her diary. Her stomach churns, and she suddenly feels as though she’s going to be sick. “Tuney, I didn’t mean-,”

“I know exactly what you meant,” Petunia stands up quickly, gathering up her cup, voice shrill and pained. “Friendless, dateless Petunia, is that it? Perfect, pretty Lily’s ugly sister. Well, look how that turned out! I found someone, didn’t I? Got married! Not that you ever cared, off in your little dream world with boys fawning over you left and right- Lily!” she gasps at the end, because Lily has run to the sink and is vomiting up both the tea and the little she’s eaten today.

When she’s done, coughing and hacking, Petunia hands her a cup of cold water, and Lily takes small sips, wincing. “I’m sorry. I don’t… I’ve been feeling out of sorts all week. I think it’s just a stomach bug”

But Petunia is looking at her oddly, and Lily slowly sets down the glass on the spotless kitchen counter. “What is it?”

“When was your last period?” Petunia asks, pursing her lips, and Lily stares at her incredulously, mouth open with a hundred denials, but then she thinks. 

“I… I don’t know. But that doesn’t- come on, Tuney, there’s been so much going on, I can’t-,”

But Petunia turns on her heel and walks quickly out of the kitchen and up the stairs, while Lily leans back against the counter and curses, loudly and coarsely. Barely a minute later Petunia returns, and presses something thin and plastic into Lily’s hand. “Just to be sure,” she says firmly, in that no-nonsense way she inherited from their father, and Lily looks from her to the pregnancy test and thinks she might be sick all over again.


	5. Chapter 5

Lily finds herself in a muggle doctor’s office for the first time in over a decade, three more positive tests and three days later. She squirms uncomfortably on the hard exam table, hoping the mysterious gap in her medical records isn’t brought up, and tries to ignore the faint sound of Dudley’s shrieking from the waiting room down the hall. 

The doctor is a woman, to her relief, a short, grey-haired woman who looks up from her papers after another few moments and says, gently, “Well, you do seem to be pregnant, Mrs. Potter.” She seems to be bracing slightly for a breakdown, which isn’t surprising given Lily’s demeanor.

But Lily can’t afford another breakdown, so instead she visibly sags and deflates like a popped party balloon, shoulder sinking, chin dropping down to her chest. She digs her hands into the cold table-top and flattens her long legs against the drawers underneath it. 

“I would be happy to give you a referral to a local obstetricians,” the doctor continues, and pauses when Lily unconsciously shakes her head. “But you likely aren’t more than two months along, if that. There are other options to consider… if this isn’t what you want,” she adds on with a cautious edge.

Lily straightens and forces a wan smile. “No, I- I’m very happy,” she lies, pulling at her faded jumper. “I just… my husband died suddenly last week,” she breathes in and out carefully. “And my son is only a year old, so it will be… difficult to adjust. But we’ll manage,” she purposefully lifts her tone. “I’m sure- I’m sure we will.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Potter,” the doctor pushes back her spectacles in concern; it reminds Lily vaguely of McGonagall and how she looked when Lily came to her after her mother had died. ‘Have a biscuit, Evans’. She can still hear the echo in her head, in between her teenage sniffles as she slouched there, head in her hands, uniform a wrinkled mess, eyes puffy.

“We do have a widows and widowers group that meets at the parish hall down the lane on Sunday nights..” Several pamphlets referring to grief, depression, and proper prenatal care on pushed into her hands, and five minutes later she is walking slowly down the narrow hall and into the sterile waiting room, where Harry is playing with a few blocks on the floor and Petunia is soothing a cranky Dudley.

Lily doesn’t have to say anything; the look in her green eyes speaks much louder than words. It looks like she won’t be going out drinking with Sirius any time soon. Very little is said until they return to Privet Drive, wherein Lily sits on the stiff floral-patterned sofa in the living room while Petunia makes yet another pot of tea. Harry happily toddles from one chair to another, examining the way the pale afternoon sunlight dapples on the floor.

“Well,” Petunia says at last, “you certainly can’t be moving any time soon, then.”

Lily doesn’t even look up at her. “I’ll make it work. I have to.” She hates the way she sounds; listless and utterly defeated. But she just can’t… It would be one thing if she had already known. If she and James had found out before… the end result might be the same, but it would have made a difference to her. 

At least he would have known. They certainly weren’t trying, not anymore than they were trying for Harry, but… they’d gotten reckless in their boredom and stress, almost daring something to happen. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice…

They were locked up in a little cottage twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, with a few rare exceptions. What else were they supposed to do? Carve tally marks into the walls? Sit there and cry? Pray? The worst part is that she has no one to blame but herself. She doesn’t even have James to lash out at. They did this. She did this. Her body. She brought a child into this world who was fated to be murdered, and now there is another inside her.

If Dumbledore so much as mentions a prophecy in her presence ever again she thinks she really will go mad. 

“Lily,” Petunia says tersely. “You cannot go running off pregnant with your second child.”

“Well, they can’t exactly stay here either, can they?” Lily demands, finally looking up at her. She feels a jab of hot guilt, but she’s not trying to manipulate her sister. She doesn’t want to be here anymore than Petunia and Vernon don’t want her here. “We’re not going to be out on the street, don’t worry. I’ll find a cheap flat somewhere for until the baby comes.” She doesn’t even have a due date. She’ll have to make an appointment at St. Mungo’s with one of the midwives.

“I’m not going to have my pregnant little sister in council housing,” Petunia retorts, and Lily just looks at her warily.

“It’s none of your-,”

“Don’t you dare tell me this isn’t my business,” Petunia hisses. “You became my business when that Lupin boy showed up on my doorstep telling me you’d almost been murdered.”

“Somehow, I doubt Vernon will see things the same way,” Lily says mockingly, like they really are squabbling girls again, and Petunia just stalks away, muttering under her breath.

Her prediction is correct; Vernon certainly does not see things the same way when Petunia broaches the topic to him a week later. Lily wishes her sister could have held her tongue, but on the other hand, she is a guest in their home and she can’t ask Petunia to lie to her husband, however much Lily might despise him. There were very few secrets between her and James, after all, but that may have been a side effect of having known each other for a decade.

She doesn’t attempt to insert herself into the middle of the fight, but she picks up enough; freak, bitch, slut, dangerous, unstable. When Petunia’s voice dies away and Vernon’s grows ever louder, puffed up with self-righteous indignation, Lily puts Harry and her coats and shoes on, and easily clambers out the guest bedroom window and floats down to the ground with the help of a weightless charm. She’s been sneaking out of houses since she was fourteen, and it’s certainly much easier now that she can use magic.

She doesn’t know where to go, but the voice in her head is hissing ‘anywhere but here’ so she walks into the cold twilight, Harry in her arms, until she reaches a shadowy corner and can safely summon the Knight Bus. The Leaky Cauldron is packed with jubilant patrons; the euphoria of Voldemort’s defeat has not yet worn off, and there is the growing awareness that this will be the first Christmas in years without the threat of dark wizards in the air. 

Lily melts into the crowd, glad she cut her hair, just another witch, albeit one with a toddler, and finds in a seat by the massive hearth. An ageing waitress brings over a little basket of crisps for Harry to shove into his mouth, and Lily nearly orders a whiskey sour but settles for pumpkin juice. No one knows her here, and it’s a relief. She can sit here in brooding silence by the fire and not have to worry about putting on a brave face or smiling or making sure her voice and hands aren’t shaking. But she still feels so cold, even with the heat of the fire on her face.

The last time she was here was just before she found out she was pregnant with Harry. It was her and James and Sirius and Marlene, and they formed a rowdy table by the back exit, laughing and shouting at each other to be heard over the din. Even in the midst of a bloody civil war, the pub had still been packed with happy drunks, or at least unafraid ones. Sirius had proposed a raucous toast to the newlyweds, since there wasn’t going to be any honeymoon, and Marlene had clinked her glass against Lily’s, grinning toothily.

Now Lily sips at her watery pumpkin juice and thinks about where she will be this time next year. Well away from Privet Drive, hopefully. She tries not to think about the baby, but of course it’s impossible. She pictures another little boy with James and Harry’s dark curls, but maybe this one will have his father’s hazel eyes. She’d like to see those eyes again. She misses them desperately. Maybe it will be alright. Harry will love having a sibling; he’s such a sweet boy, even to Dudley, who pushes him around and pulls his hair.

“Lily?” The voice is unfamiliar and thin and quiet, and Lily looks up in alarm, her grip tightening on Harry, sitting in her lap. Her free hand finds her wand in her coat pocket. But the girl-woman staring at her doesn’t look like much of a threat. Lily looks at her a moment longer, and then questions, “Mary?”

Mary Macdonald is much changed from their Hogwarts days. Lily remembers her as a tall, willowy girl with thick chestnut brown hair, a Roman nose, and a soft voice. They shared a dorm room for seven years, along with wild Marlene and rational Dorcas. The five of them were their own little pack of sorts, when Marlene wasn’t in detention and Dorcas wasn’t studying and Mary wasn’t off with her sometimes boyfriend, a blonde Slytherin, surname Pucey…. Lily smiles in spite of herself, because she hasn’t seen Mary since they were seventeen, and has no tainted memories of her in the order. Mary dropped out halfway through their seventh year. Pregnant. But not anymore; now she carries herself a bit more proudly, has blonde highlights in her freshly cut hair, and her coat and bag look well-made, expensive.

“It is you,” Mary says almost wonderingly, and takes a seat across from Lily; she would have hesitated to do so when they were teenagers, but now she’s more comfortable in her own skin; she’s tanner than Lily remembers as well, as if she spent the past summer on a sunny beach somewhere. “I only just got back a week ago,” Mary says, brushing her side bangs out of her brown eyes; she looks at Harry as if shocked. “He’s…”

Lily waits for the inevitable ‘the chosen one, so lucky, an extraordinary wizard in the making, a miracle, the both of you, can’t believe you’re alive, what happened-’ but it never comes. “-a beautiful baby,” Mary finishes, and smiles kindly at her. “My Adrian is three now. He looks just like his dad.” She could say the same of Harry, but mercifully, she does not, and Lily is forever grateful to her for that.

“Your and-,” Lily briefly struggles to recall Mary’s boyfriend’s first name, “Dorian’s boy?”

“Yes,” Mary says, and from her tone Lily takes it that they must still be together, because she sounds like she’s talking about a favorite book or film. “We- well, I suppose it’s my fault for never writing, but Dorian didn’t know if it’d be safe to- well, anyways, after we found out I was pregnant I went to stay with his cousins in Dover until he finished school. And then we went across the channel after the baby was born.”

Lily knows enough background information to put the rest of the pieces together. One of Pucey’s uncles was a known Death Eater. His nephew shacking up with a known muggleborn couldn’t have sat well. But it turned out alright for them, didn’t it? They could run. They could stay out of sight. They could do what Lily’s family could not. 

“But how are you?” Mary asks, somewhat hesitantly, as if she knows she probably won’t like the answer, and Lily just locks eyes with her and shakes her head briefly before an almost hysterical chuckles squeezes out of her throat and her eyes well up once more. And then Mary reaches across the grimy table and takes her cold, trembling hands in her own, and they stay like that for some time.


	6. Chapter 6

Lily goes home for the night with Mary, who now resides in a small, neat house in Exeter with her husband and son. The events of the last six months come spilling out of Lily on the way, until her throat aches and her eyes are painfully dry. She feels like a little girl, letting Mary make-up the sofa for her and Harry, but she does so without complaint, and Lily only catches a glimpse of Dorian, who looks much the same as he did in school, although his ash blonde hair is beginning to thin. 

The sofa is brand new and thus a good less comfortable than it could be, but Lily wagers it’s still better than trying to get Harry to sleep while listening to Vernon and Petunia shout at each other. She lays stiffly on her side, rubbing Harry’s back until he nods off, and eavesdrops on the muted conversation Mary and Dorian are having in the next room, careful not to wake their own child. Eavesdropping might as well be an Evans family trait, and Lily learned from the best, her sister.

As far as she can tell, they are discussing Mary’s family, who Lily never knew much about. Mary never liked to talk about them much, only saying that they were muggles and that her father hadn’t been happy with her attending Hogwarts. Now Lily hears that Mary’s father has since died, that her brother is in trouble with the law again, and that her sister has moved to London with some school friends. And that Mary’s mother refuses to see her.

Lily’s not sure what’s more painful; knowing you have barely any family left at all, or knowing that the family you do have wants nothing to do with you. 

In the morning she wakes up to find Dorian doubling between making breakfast and getting ready for work.Mary told her he just got a job with the Goblin Liaison office in the Ministry. Lily sits there blearily for a few moments, wishing she had a better taste inside her mouth, when Dorian says, “Want an egg?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Sorry, but the smell-,”

“Right,” he nods without looking at her, precariously slathering jam on a slice of toast. “Mare told me you were expecting.”

Lily feels her cheeks redden, but instead she busies herself with straightening her rumpled blouse and combing through her hair. “It’s… not been the greatest past three weeks,” she mutters. “Obviously.” For the rest of the world, of course, it has been. Nothing like the downfall of the man everyone knew to be the next Grindelwald to bring the magical world to rejoicing. There’s been news of revelries from Bristol to Brisbane, Berlin to Boston. 

“You got a bad hand,” Dorian says neutrally, “feels like most of our class did, sometimes.” His tone is casual, but she sees the way his shoulders stiffen minutely.

“Your uncle…” Lily doesn’t know where she’s going with this. “He’s in Azkaban.” She read it in the paper shortly before Halloween.  
“Yes.” He finally turns to regard her, leaning against his kitchen counter, tie loosened around his neck. He’s similar enough in build to James that if she squints it will hurt horribly in her chest. “We ran. I don’t blame you for judging us for that. Maybe we could have stayed, kept our heads down, but I didn’t think it was worth the risk.”

“It wasn’t,” Lily says immediately. How many muggleborns like her and Mary does she know from school that made it out unscathed? How many weren’t hunted down for sport or just up and vanished one day? “You did what you had to.”

“We did,” he acknowledges. “I used to think about getting revenge, you know. On Mulciber and Wilkes, after what they did to her in fourth year. She told me about it, after we started going out for a while. I fantasized about what I’d do to them a lot.” 

Harry is beginning to stir in Lily’s lap, but she does not, cannot look away from Dorian. “But that would have just escalated things,” he says after a moment. “And I knew by then that I couldn’t risk her- us- like that. So I didn’t do anything. Never said so much as a word to them about it. I had plenty of opportunities.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Lily says quietly.

“I do anyways,” he shrugs almost lightly. “It’s the weight of loving someone. You always blame yourself. You always put their pain on you like a coat. And it feels good, most of the time. Feels nice. Until you finally take it off and put it away.”

He takes another bite of his toast, chewing thoughtfully, and then Lily breaks into a slight smile. He reminds her of Remus, and James in his more quiet moments, which he was always slightly bashful of, as if he thought it’d annoy her. “I can see why Mary thought you were worth running away with.”

“He’s always been very romantic,” Mary says with a small smile, coming into the small sitting room with Adrian on her hip. She surveys Lily considerately. “If you need a change of clothes, you’re probably about the same size as me…”

“It’s no trouble, I should get going anyways,” Lily says, standing up with a sigh.

“Mama, hungry,” Harry insists, rubbing at his sleep-crusted eyes. 

“After breakfast,” Dorian breaks off a piece of his toast and hands it to him. “Most important meal of the day.”

She returns to Privet Drive by noon, resolved to collect her things and make as clean an exit as possible. She’ll make sure she has a phone line in the new place, try to call Petunia when she gets there, although part of her doubts her sister will ever answer. But as she stands at the foot of the drive, a wholly unexpected sight greets her; Petunia, jerkily wheeling a faded suitcase after her, Dudley in an overstuffed winter coat that turns him into a green ball in her arms. “What are you doing?” Lily gapes at her sister, who slams the front door shut behind her. 

“Don’t ask questions,” Petunia snaps, and nods to the brand new Ford Cortina. “Get in.”

“Tuney, what’s going on?” Lily says, although her feet move towards the car on instinct.

“What’s going on is that we’re spending the night in a hotel,” Petunia says through gritted teeth as she buckles Dudley into a carseat. “I don’t have a spare, you’ll have to hold Harry on your lap.”

“You’re leaving Vernon?” Lily remembers at the last second to lower her voice, seeing as Petunia looks ready to throttle her. Her sister clambers into the driver’s seat, keys jingling in her clenched fist.

“He gave me a choice, and I made it,” she says shortly as she starts the engine and reverses the car so quickly that it jumps the curb onto the street. Lily holds onto Harry a little tighter as Petunia jerks the wheel, hard, and hits the gas, speeding down the sedate little street. 

“Where’d you learn to drive like this?” She can’t help but smile; she’s wanted to do this exact thing for days now.

“I watch a lot of daytime telly. Lots of dramatic car chases,” Petunia says snidely as they shoot around the corner. Lily buckles her seatbelt and leans back in the seat. 

Neither of them says another word until they hit the motorway, leaving Little Whinging behind. “What was the choice?” Lily asks, watching other cars rush by. It feels like ages since she’s been in a car. She lowers her window a little, lets the wind tickle her face and hair. She forgot how much she missed it. She never was one for brooms and flying, for all of enthusiasm towards the rest of the magical world.

Petunia says nothing, lips pressed together in a thin line, so Lily fiddles with the radio instead, until she settles on a station she likes. Wizarding bands are alright, but they’re nothing compared to Queen. And if anything can get Petunia to talk, even if it’s to tell her ‘turn that rubbish off’, loud rock music is usually it. Lily knows that from years of blasting the radio in their room at home.

“It’s the terror of knowing what the world is about, watching some good friends screaming ‘let me out!’,” she sings under her breath, letting the pale November sunlight wash over her face. She raises her voice a little, ignoring how out of tune she might be. “Pray tomorrow gets me higher, pressure on people, people on streets-,”

The radio crackles with static as Petunia finally snaps, switching the dial off. “Alright, enough!”

Lily just gives her a sidelong glance. “Well?”

“Vernon said I had to choose between my marriage or my-,” Petunia hesitates, then looks back at the road ahead, soldiering on as she always has, “my freak sister and her brat.”

Lily immediately creases in sympathy, regardless of the language. “Oh, Petunia-,”

“I’m not done,” Petunia cuts her off. “You always interrupt me, Lily, honestly. It’s unbelievable.” She draws in a short breath. “So I did. I chose. And I told him exactly where he could shove it.”

To her astonishment, Lily thinks she almost detects the shadow of a genuine smile on Petunia’s face. “You…”

“I almost lost you once,” Petunia huffs. “I’m not about to lose you again, Lily. Is that really so hard to believe?”

Lily looks at her, thinking that if it wouldn’t risk life and limb to do so, she’d throw her arms around her sister at this very moment. She glances back almost fondly at Dudley, sucking on a lolly in his car seat. “Tu, isn’t that a choking hazard?” The moment is immediately ruined, but that’s always been the case for the Evans girls. They’ve both learned to take the sweet with the sour long ago.

“Don’t tell me how to parent my son,” Petunia hisses, while at the same time reaching back with one hand to slap the sweet out of Dudley’s grasping fingers. 

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Lily smirks, reclining against the window, and blowing a bubble with her wand for Harry, who immediately lights up and giggles. Petunia flinches away from the bubble as if it were a wasp, and the car swerves slightly. Dudley squeals.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I drive?”

“Don’t start,” Petunia points an accusing finger at her. “I swear, Lily, I will turn this car straight around and drop you off at the nearest bus depot.”

Lily glares at her, and then a laugh bubbles out of her, a real one, not forced or hysterical or shrill, and after a moment, Petunia gives an amused little snort herself, and Lily turns the radio back on. “I suppose we’ll be looking for a slightly bigger flat.”

Petunia’s ensuing rant in regards to council housing, at times straining to be heard over Lily singing along to John Lennon, makes the drive go just a bit quicker. They spend the night in a cheap hotel room with peeling wallpaper and a stained carpet and a phone that doesn’t work, and walk down to the payphone in the lobby together to order takeout after securing the boys in a borrowed playpen. It’s almost like they’re ten and eight again, on a rare vacation to the seashore with their parents, before everything got turned upside down with the arrival of Lily’s letter and Petunia’s envious stares. 

And when Petunia breaks down in tears near midnight, after the boys are washed and put to bed, Lily sits out on the bed beside her and wraps her arms around her the way Petunia did for her several weeks ago. “We’ll be alright,” she says as bravely as she can, but the truth is she does feel a little more like her old self now, because if Petunia Mary Dursley, nee Evans, can up and leave her blowhard of a husband and take the car while she’s at it, then Lily can certainly face the wind and the rain and march through these next painful months. 

“C’mon, Pet, you know we will. We always make it through. We’re too bloody stubborn not to.” Petunia nods in between sniffles, and rests her head against Lily’s, their hair intermingling, dirty blonde and autumn red.


	7. Chapter 7

Lily spends the week before Christmas unpacking. There are some perks to being a former Order member beyond scars both mental and physical. She gets in touch with Emmeline Vance, whose brother is a realtor, and with a combination of both luck, a significant portion of the Potter fortune, and celebrity leverage, manages to sign on a rundown Georgian farmhouse in Leicester, with a small gardener’s cottage at the back of the field behind it. 

Petunia is aghast when Lily tells her she intends to take the much shabbier cottage for herself and Harry and let Petunia and Dudley take the main house. “I barely paid for any of it,” Petunia sputters, even though Lily can see the spark of desire in her eyes as they take in the house. “You can’t possibly-,”

“Tuney, I love you,” Lily says dryly, “but we’re both grown women now and we are never going to be able to live in the same house again without wanting to murder each other. Besides, you love to decorate- think of it as a project. Something to take your mind off the…,” she trails off, because papers being drawn up by Vernon’s slimy new lawyer or not, ‘divorce’ is still very much a dirty word for her sister.

“And I hope you don’t intend to ban Harry and I from the premises,” she adds with a slight teasing lilt. “Seeing as my unearned galleons paid for it.” At the very least, they won’t have to shell out nearly as much money for any renovations; magic certainly makes painting, wallpapering, and the lifting of heavy furniture less of a burden.

She genuinely prefers the little cottage anyways; it’s close enough to the house that if Petunia steps out on the overgrown patio and yells, Lily might hear her, and close enough that she can see the lights flick off every night. But there are no sounds of traffic or lawnmowers or television, and the rambling, disastrous plant and vegetable garden, now a mass of dead leaves and thorny, barren branches, is beckoning to her. The two bedrooms will be more than enough; Harry and the new baby can share, and eventually both children will be off to Hogwarts for most of the year anyways.

But for the time being, she puts Harry’s new crib in the corner of her own room, cramped as it might be. She can’t bear the thought of not being able to reach him in a moment’s notice. And the nightmares are easier to bear when she can wake up to the sound of his breathing or soft whimpers in his sleep. She fills the cottage with poinsettias and holly, and hacks down a small Christmas tree herself with an old hatchet she found in the cellar. There’s something decidedly freeing about throwing all of her weight into each brutal swing. 

Of course, Petunia comes running out across the hard, slick ground to scream at her to put the axe down, she’s pregnant, it’s freezing cold, but Lily just squares her shoulders and takes another swing. Last Christmas their tree brushed the ceiling of the sitting room. This feeble specimen is barely past her waist, but she tries to think of it as being the perfect size for Harry o help her decorate instead. She makes paper chains with him slathering glue everywhere on the wooden kitchen table, and holds him up to place to the shiny gold star on the top.

She can’t bring herself to use most of the ornaments she and James excitedly bought for their first Christmas as a married couple, but she does hang a tiny broom with a Gryffindor player astride it near the top. Maybe she should buy Harry another toy broom, although she really won’t be able to run after him much in another few months. Maybe she should talk about James with him more, but the words always lodge in her throat.

Instead she puts up just one photo of them on the mantle; she can’t look at any of their wedding photos or the ones from when she was pregnant with Harry without breaking down, so this photo is of them shortly before their graduation. They are in Hogsmeade, arms wrapped around one another, laughing uproariously at some joke or another, as other students pass through the frame, oblivious. 

She misses the girl in the photo almost more than the boy; that Lily was entirely unafraid. She was the opposite; she was eager to go out into the wide world, eager to fight, eager to start her life, eager to see what happened next. Now, three and a half years later, she is mostly consumed by dread. She doesn’t want to know the future. She doesn’t want to keep going. She wants to huddle down right where she is now and never leave.

Mary and Dorian invite her for Christmas Eve dinner; Petunia refuses to attend, of course, but Lily can’t stand the thought of spending another night in a too quiet house, and goes, taking Harry with her. The Puceys have a small dinner, and she’s relieved; she’s not sure she could face a party full of old classmates at this point. They let Adrian open a few of his gifts early, and to Lily’s surprise, present Harry with a little red tricycle. “Not as exciting as a broom,” Mary admits, “but it should be easier on you, right?”

Lily opens her mouth to thank them but a strange choked up rasp comes out instead; she flushes in embarrassment, but neither seem to mind.

She doesn’t stay too late; Harry has passed out on the sofa beside Adrian by ten, and Lily bundles him up in his coat and little scarf and says her goodbyes, wishing more than anything that she still had what Mary and Dorian have. A couple smiling and talking quietly while they put their son to bed. She might have a new home, but it’s not the same. It can never be the same.

On Christmas morning she wakes up alone, in a cold bed. She wraps a wool blanket around her shoulders and stokes up the fire in the hearth, puts on the kettle. She waits to hear Harry rattling the bars of his crib, then puts on his boots and plods across the frosty ground to the house, where his and Dudley’s presents are congregated under Petunia’s trusty artificial tree. It’s quite a meager offering compared to last year; Lily was in no state to go Christmas shopping, and the hordes of well-wishers have died off some, since it has been two months now.

She sips her rapidly cooling mug of tea while Petunia rattles around in the kitchen, before finally presenting the boys with a somewhat battered tray of cinnamon rolls. Dudley tears through his presents in record time, and fights with Harry over a truck. Lily hands her present to Petunia, who blanches, but has something for Lily too. They open them in silence, and then look at each other in surprise.

“Remember the music box we used to have in our room when we were little? With the ballerina?” Lily asks by way of explanation for hers. “I saw that in a catalogue, and I thought… it looks just like it, doesn’t it? The one I broke when I was seven?”

“I didn’t speak to you for a week,” Petunia recalls, a strange look in her pale blue eyes.

“It was an accident,” Lily reminds her, but she has uncovered her own gift; an infant outfit set, all lacy white and clearly high quality. 

“Dudley had one just like it when he was born,” Petunia says. “He looked like an angel. Yours will too.” It is perhaps the kindest thing she has ever said in reference to Lily’s children, both born and unborn. Lily almost upends the tray of cinnamon rolls in her sudden embrace of her, and Petunia’s arms are a bit less stiff than usual around her.

She has both Sirius and Remus over the day after Christmas. Sirius is clearly hungover, skin clammy and eyes bloodshot. Remus looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks; the shadows under his eyes and lines in his face are more pronounced than ever. Lily feels almost as if she has been coping well in comparison, and she is the one who lost a husband. But James was like a brother to them long before he was married to her, she reminds herself sharply. 

They’re not openly hostile with one another, but it’s obvious they haven’t spent any time together since the funeral. “I’m not sure how to tell you this,” Lily begins once they’re all seated in the gardener’s cottage, so instead of wasting time trying to explain or justify it, she plainly states, “I’m pregnant. I was pregnant when… when it happened, and I didn’t know, but now I do. James never knew. The baby’s due in the beginning of July.”

There is a long, hollow silence that follows, and then Remus straightens a little, plasters on a smile, and says, “Congratulations, Lil. That’s… that’s amazing.”

Sirius has no such compunctions, nor has he ever. He stares at her as if she just sent an Unforgivable his way, stands up, and barges out the door. He is Padfoot before he’s gone more than two paces, and a black blur streaks towards the woods behind the field. Remus sighs. “He’s not been well, I don’t think.”

“Can you blame him? Because I don’t.” Lily sinks her head into her hands all the same. This not at all how she envisioned it going, but she supposes it could have been worse. They both could have walked out on her. They could have refused to come at all. These things happen with grief, like all the parents who separate after losing a child. In a way, James was almost like their child, like they felt some guardianship over him, over each other.

He was always looking to the future, James, for all that he lived in the present. Lily remembers. He wanted a whole household of children, after growing up a spoiled but lonely only son. “At least four,” he’d insist, “so no one’s stuck in the middle,” and Lily would just throw back her head and laugh and say, “I hope you plan on adopting, then, Jimmy.” 

He hated when she called him Jimmy. Or Jim. Or Jamie. Her silly vain lover boy James- just James, no nicknames. Like James Bond. It would send Sirius and Remus into heaps of hysterical laughter, though. Her arrogant, lovely, generous James, who wanted four children, unlike her, and a big garden out back, like her, and who would have given anything to be here right now.

“He needs time,” Remus says. “We all do. But for him- I’ve still got my dad, at least. Sirius doesn’t… well, it’s just us and Harry, for him. Especially with his brother and Marlene-,” he just jerks his head a little, not completing the sentence.

Lily lifts her head, and picks up her coat. “I’m going to talk to him. Watch Harry, will you?” Harry has been engrossed with his new blocks for hours now in a corner, building up towers just to topple them, cackling all the while. Remus inclines his head and goes over to him as she ducks outside. The wind rises bitterly to meet her, but Lily stalks into it instead, and is grateful for the fresh inch of slush on the ground; she can read the tracks very clearly.

Padfoot is lapping up frigid water from a mostly frozen stream, only patches of dark water visible, mars in the pristine ice. His thick coat shudders in the cold. Lily first met Padfoot when she was fifteen, only she didn’t realize it was also Sirius, then. He was just a nice dog following her and Marlene through Hogsmeade. Marlene threw him a sandwich, and he took off with it, barking. She sinks her numb fingers into his fur, knowing he heard her coming up on him.

“Good doggy,” she says only a little sarcastically under her breath, crouching down on a withered log. He rests his furry head on her legs, eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. I know you- well, you were the first we told about Harry.”

He just snuffles in the cold. “And I’m sorry about Marlene,” she whispers this, because the words are too fragile. “I know you- you put on a brave face about it, Sirius, but I know that was… awful for you.”

Padfoot pads away from her, and turns back into a long-haired young man in a leather jacket. He sits on the edge of her log, and Lily rests her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know,” Sirius says, “it’s not like- I wasn’t her boyfriend or anything. We weren’t together. Didn’t feel like I could say anything, at the funeral. But we-,” he shakes his head. “We were stupid kids. We could have- it could have been for us like it was for you and James, but we were both too scared to admit it. Me more so than her, I think.”

“Marlene wasn’t any more ready to settle down and spread her roots than you,” Lily says softly. “She was just as wild, Sir. But she did- maybe it wasn’t you know, true love, maybe it wouldn’t have worked out in the long run, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real, that it didn’t matter. You felt for each other. You were good together.”

“We were awful together, which is why we were never ‘together’,” Sirius grins balefully at that, and ruffles her still-short hair. “Not like you and James. Merlin, we couldn’t go more than a couple days without getting into a screaming row and throwing shit.”

“It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows with us either,” Lily mutters, but she knows what he means. They weren’t stable, weren’t an established couple, they had a fling, ran hot and heavy, never admitted what they might have meant to each other, never had the chance to mature into something serious. But it still counted, didn’t it? Still mattered. 

“You’re still allowed to miss her,” she adds. “Just like I miss James, every day. Last night, I-,” her breath catches in her throat, “I dreamed about him. Not just of him. Dreamed he was here with me.”

Sirius just looks at her and smiles sadly, and says, “When I dream about her, it’s not- it’s never a good dream.” Lily can taste the smoke from the wreckage of the McKinnon’s home on her tongue then, can feel the heat searing her face, and in her mind’s eye, she can imagine Sirius, standing in the darkness, looking up at the skull and serpent in the sky and knowing she’s gone. There are worse ways to die than a Killing Curse, and Lily counts her blessings once more that it didn’t end so bloodily for her and James. 

She wraps her arms around him and holds onto him tightly, so he cannot slip away again, and when they walk back together, Padfoot paces at her side, and Harry shrieks with joy, watching with Remus from the foggy window, to see that side of his godfather once more.


	8. Chapter 8

Lily is four and a half months pregnant and setting foot in Knockturn Alley for the first time in years. She’s slipped down its grimy streets before, but that was as a reckless teenager, before the war was bad enough that the entire area was sealed off by aurors and hit wizards on patrol. But that was when there were curfews and Ministry law enforcement on every street corner, when people didn’t go set foot in Diagon Alley after sundown, nevermind Knockturn. 

But the war is over, the Daily Prophet proclaims with increased vigor every week, and it’s a new year. And a significant portion of the witches and wizards who made Knockturn so dangerous are now in prison. Besides, Lily is not some helpless waif. If anything, she feels a queer, heady sort of confidence, although it’s foolish. Let someone say something, let someone try something, a goading little voice in her head hisses, and then they’ll see. As if she’s waiting for an excuse to unleash months worth of rage and grief, and maybe she is.

She’s glad wizards don’t have television, don’t have news anchors or paparazzi. She’s just another anonymous witch today, and the sleeting rain and bitter chill in the air makes people duck their head, hunch their shoulders, and grimace at the cobblestoned ground. The papers have ceased showing grainy photos of her from her school days, grinning cheekily at the camera. She doubts any of her friends responded to requests for recent pictures, and she and James hardly had a public wedding. Theirs was barely more than an elopement.

But she isn’t in Knockturn to roam around unnoticed. She’s here for supplies, because everyone knows Knockturn has the superior apothecary, and while she hasn’t gotten her written exam, bottled sample, and application results back from the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers yet, she’s confident enough to assume that she’ll be among their ranks soon enough. Which means her career will, at long last, be off the ground.

Technically she doesn’t have to work. Technically she could live modestly and quietly on the remaining money and pursue employment once the children are off to school. But she’ll go mad if she doesn’t have something to occupy her mind besides preparing for the baby and playing with Harry. She loves him, but she’s spent nearly all day of every day with him for two and a half years now. And while she’s not about to rush off to work as an auror or healer, despite knowing both the Ministry and St. Mungo’s would likely accept her on name alone, she does need to do something. 

And why not potions? It was one of her best classes in school, she scored a nearly perfect O on both the OWL and the NEWT, and she genuinely enjoyed it. Unlike James, who couldn’t brew a forgetfulness potion to save his own life. Sirius was decent with brewing when he tried, which was very rare, and Remus always managed to redeem himself with his essays. Marlene blew up her cauldron at least five times, and Mary never really tried to begin with. Dorcas was quite good, though. Lily remembers partnering with her to brew Amortentia when they were sixth years, after she and Severus could no longer look at each other, never mind share a table in Slughorn’s class.

She ducks under the awning of the admittedly sinister looking apothecary, peering into the dusty windows and closing her dark green umbrella. Lily catches sight of her blurred reflection in a mottled puddle on the ground, a flash of damp red hair and a pale face, and then something- someone- else behind her, and she turns quickly, hand flying to her wand in her pocket, to find herself face to face with Severus. They stare at one another in mute surprise. He looks a bit less gaunt and hollow-eyed than when she saw him last, but perhaps it’s just the light of day.

He stares at her, less shocked than he was that night in Godric’s Hollow, but caught off guard nonetheless, and Lily thinks she could still kill him where he stands; the street is empty; with none the wiser. But she is not the half-deranged valkyrie running on instinct and adrenaline that she was that night, and she knows by now that he is not going to raise his wand to her, so instead she forces herself to relax slightly. As much as one can, after all, when confronted with their former best friend, the man who sold them out to his Dark Lord.

She knows that even if she and Severus had hated one another since childhood, it wouldn’t have changed anything, that the fact that it was him that overheard the prophecy was mere coincidence, a mockery of fate, but part of her still feels a deep, aching guilt all the same. As if she failed, somehow. As if she could have prevented it all, could have steered him away when they were young, could have tried harder, could have convinced him.

“Lily,” he says hoarsely, at last. The only sound up until now has been the rough patter of the rain on the roof shingles above. 

She imagines slapping him, as hard as she can, leaving a scarlet mark on his face. She imagines hexing him across the street. She imagines running away, because there is a sort of fear curdling in her stomach, not so much of him but of what he represents. The only reason he is not dead or rotting in a cell in Azkaban is because Dumbledore managed to turn him. Dumbledore did what she could not. Perhaps it’s arrogant of her to feel vaguely outraged by that, but she always was a girl who thought too highly of herself, as Petunia would put it.

“Severus,” she says, and while she knows she should walk away, she is rooted to the spot. “I heard you’ve been granted a position at Hogwarts.” Potions master. The idea of Severus teaching anyone, let alone a class full of timid children, is laughable in a darkly funny way, but she supposes it makes sense. Dumbledore likely doesn’t want to risk letting him out of his sight. And he’s surely a target now for the Death Eaters that have escaped punishment. 

He gives a minuscule nod, eyes not leaving his face. He has the same eyes as his mother, Lily always thought, although she’d seldom been invited round the Snape home. They spent most of their time roaming the streets of Cokeworth, or down by the river, hunched under bridges chucking rocks into the grey rushing water, or lying down in the ferns, looking up at the sky, or listening to the radio. One time they drove his dad’s car down the lane, when they were fourteen and Tobias Snape was passed out drunk in front of the telly.

He found out, of course, as did half the neighborhood, when Severus smashed into Mrs. Doyle’s faded white picket fence. It was Lily’s idea, but she wasn’t the one who went home and got a beating. If she could go back, of course she would do things differently. Of course. She was naive. She didn’t understand parts of his childhood, didn’t see it as she does now, all the signs, all the turn signals. But she was a little girl. She didn’t know. It’s not her fault, she thinks, hopes. She tried. She really did try, with him. 

“How are you?” he finally says, when she doesn’t say another word.

Lily just smiles placidly at him, and says, “How do you think?”

He recoils as if stung by a wasp, and she sees the recognition in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, “I’m sorry, Lily, you don’t know how sorry I am, I didn’t- I never meant for any of this-,”

“You’re sorry he’s dead then?” she whispers, and smiles, placidity rotting into something else. She’s showing all her teeth. “Look at me and tell me you’re sorry my husband’s dead, Severus.” Slytherins are supposed to be good liars, aren’t they? And he was always one of the best. She’s still trying to piece together what were the lies he told her and what were the truths he simply chose to ignore.

He looks at her, but his mouth opens and shuts like a sputtering light. “I-,” his eyes are grasping, searching, those dark, dark eyes that she found tremendously sad on his mother and tremendously frightened on him, when they were children. Always scared, he was always scared, just like Tuney, and she had to be brave, bright Lily for them because they were just so scared it made them say and do the most awful things to her, they were so weak and frightened and-

“You’re glad,” she breathes, “I know you are. You hated him. You would have leapt at the chance to kill him yourself. Do you wish your master had brought you along? Then you could have finally done it- finally gotten one over on him, wouldn’t you? You would have done it with a smile on your face, and then what? Would you have stepped over him to kill my son?”

He twitches slightly in revulsion or fear or acknowledgement and Lily’s horrible smile vanishes back between her lips, like petals folding shut. “Well,” she says tremulously, “I hope you know I would have done the same to you. Are you happy then, Sev? We’re so alike now. That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it?”

“You’re wrong,” he rasps, “you’re wrong, I never- I didn’t want this, none of it, I tried to convince him, I told him there must have been some mistake, that it could be another child-,”

“So you could butcher someone else’s baby?” She steps right up to him and their height difference is not as pronounced as it was when they were fifteen and in the grips of cloying puberty, and she almost spits in his face. “Should I be glad? That your sense of basic fucking humanity extended to me alone? If you hadn’t known me from Eve you would have held me back while he killed my husband, my baby, and then you would have finished the job like a good little lapdog, begging for scraps.” Her lips curl in a snarl. “You used to make me so angry, Sev. So hurt, you know? I felt betrayed. It’s better now. Now I just feel disgust.” She steps back, and the lines of his face waver, as if he were a ghost.

“I loved you,” he almost pleads, but not quite, it is more of a meager, desperate defense, a last ditch effort, although the deed is already done, they both know it. “I loved you, all I wanted was for you to see me- I just wanted- we could have-,” he is reduced to wild stares again, and Lily stiffens, although she’s known it for years now, he never had to say it.

“I loved you too,” she says in a different voice, and a sliver of compassion creeps in, even now, as irredeemable and unrepenting as he might be. “I loved you like you were my own brother, my own family, my blood, Sev. I did love you, just not the way you wanted. But you couldn’t accept that. You never could. You loved me- we were children. That girl was only here for a little while, and she’s gone away now. And she’s never coming back, and neither are you. That boy I loved like a brother- he’s not there anymore, and I’m not sure he ever was.” She sucks in a breath of cold, damp air. 

The rain patters on, and the space between them seems to shudder, and she doesn’t break eye contact with those frightened dark eyes until he steps back, out from under the awning, and turns and walks away into the gloom of Knockturn. And Lily watches him go, and then turns and walks into the apothecary, trying to recall her misplaced list of ingredients she needs to purchase in bulk.


	9. Chapter 9

Lily spends the rest of her pregnancy in relative solitude, busying herself with turning the cottage cellar into a proper potions laboratory, organizing crates and barrels and endless jars, and calling on Petunia’s pinch-lipped and Remus’ bemused help when her back starts to ache and her feet and hands swell. She doesn’t want to be seen out in the magical public much, not wanting pictures of her pregnant frame plastered across some rag while Rita Skeeter speculates if the child is really her late husband’s. 

But she does manage to get over to Mary and Dorian’s for dinner at least once a month, and she insists that Remus and Sirius meet her for tea every Sunday, not so much because any of them adore the ritual, aside from Remus. But because this way they all have something to look forward to, or at least dread, and dreading is still better than nothing, still better than numbness, than letting yourself fade away. Besides, she needs someone to complain to- Petunia has had her own child, of course, but she is still Petunia, and only sympathetic up to a certain point.

And Lily can only hear the deeply horrifying tale of every miserable symptom Petunia experienced while pregnant with Dudley and his breech birth turned C-section so many times, after all. She loves her sister, but comparing their motherhood experiences isn’t going to help heal the rifts between them any time soon. Although Dudley does seem rather improved the longer amount of time he spends away from Vernon, who has only deigned to see his son a few times since the divorce, and who is reportedly already seeking out the new Mrs. Dursley.

Lily reintroduces Petunia to the fine art of prank-calling, something they occasionally did as bored little girls when their mother was busy with the laundry, in revenge.

Everyone asks her whether she’d rather another boy or a girl this time around, and Lily always says she doesn’t care, so long as they’re healthy. In truth, thinking about it makes her feel ill, because it makes her remember her and James discussing Harry’s gender, how they had at times hoped, secretly or not, for a girl. The prophecy specified a boy, you see. Fate is funny that way. And Lily dreamed of a little girl with James’ impish smile and unruly black hair. But she dreamed of that child the way she dreamed of peace, fleetingly, and knowing deep down that it was far beyond her reach.

“If it is a boy, it’ll be Sirius Remus of course,” she tells them, only half-jokingly. “Or Remus Sirius? Do you suppose that sounds better?”

“If you saddle the poor thing with my horrendous name in any way, shape, or form, I’ll be forced to report you to child welfare,” Sirius scowls, while Remus just snickers. “Truly terrible idea, Lily. Really. My mother would be rolling in her grave-,”

“But surely that’s a positive,” Lily cuts in with a small grin.

“Let’s not tempt her,” Remus mutters, pushing a biscuit onto her plate. “You should eat more. You’re not nearly fat enough for a pregnant woman.”

Sirius gives a low whistle. “Playing with fire there, mate.”

“Prick,” Lily takes a savage bite of the biscuit, pulling a childish face at the both of them, and hands the rest to Harry, teething happily in his high chair. “Don’t try to down it all at once, darling.” He mumbles happily around the crumbs in response. 

But it is lonely. She can be surrounded by people and feel achingly lonely. Remus and Sirius and Petunia and Mary and Dorian all care about her, care about the pregnancy, care about Harry, but it’s not the same. It can never be the same. This pregnancy is James’ as well. He should be here to go to appointments with her and to rub her shoulders and to get things from high shelves she can no longer strain to reach. He should be here to feel the baby kick and to cradle her belly and entwine his long legs with her in bed. He should be here to tell her that she is the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen, even when she is vomiting bile into the toilet.

Her loneliness is borne out of selfishness, and perhaps that’s why she feels even worse about it. Shouldn’t she want him back just for him? Of course she does. She misses James more than she can bear, and not just because she has to endure this pregnancy, and parenthood in general, all alone. But when she was pregnant with Harry, as worried and angry and terrified as they were, there was still a sense that it was them against a cruel world. They were united in that, at least, even if they fought like cats and dogs the closer she got to her due date.

Lily knows she wasn’t a perfect wife. She is temperamental and stubborn, and she hates to admit defeat in an argument, even when she’s wrong. She especially hated to admit defeat to James, for how smug he could get, how triumphant. She said things she regrets, and she shut him out at times; rolled over in bed and refused to speak to him, turned up her nose at dinner, drowned him out with the radio. And she certainly isn’t a perfect mother. But they loved each other, they really, really did, and it sounds silly but she was always certain of that, always, from the time they first said it.

James said it first, accidentally and too casually, when she was rushing off to a class she was late for in the spring of their seventh year. They’d only been dating for seven months, and they’d only been ‘serious’ since January. “Love you,” had slipped out from between his lips while she hastily stuffed her books and parchment into her bag, and she’d frozen, looking at him, while he rested his chin on his fist and lazily flicked through another page of his Transfiguration textbook.

Then he’d glanced up at her in confusion, realized it, and flushed scarlet, opening his mouth to offer some half-hearted excuse, but she’d already pounced on him, straddling his lap and kissing him happily, laughing, until Madam Pince had found them and shrieked bloody murder. Lily had slung her bag over her shoulder and dashed out, adjusting her skirt and grinning like a madwoman, and James had lounged back in his chair and pouted unconvincingly about about how they hadn’t even used any tongue.

The last time he said it was that night, playing with Harry on the sofa, whispering conspiratorially, “I think Mummy loves you more than me,” as he bounced Harry in his lap and made fairy lights dance about the room, casting strange little pixie shadows on the walls. 

“It’s true,” Lily had said, leaning over the back of the sofa to peck Harry on the head, “He’s far more handsome, too.” James had recoiled in mock horror as if he’d been slapped, and then grabbed her by the arm to snog her properly, her hair falling like a curtain between them and Harry, who promptly pulled at it, giggling. 

“Well, I do love you just a little,” Lily had said breathlessly, wincing as she disentangled her hair from Harry’s grip, still damp from the shower. She indicated a tiny gap between her pointer finger and thumb, and winked at Harry. “This much?”

“It’s better than nothing,” James had groused, flopping back and throwing Harry up over him only to catch him, squealing. “I love you just a little too, now that I think about it.” And the look in his hazel eyes had been so warm and inviting, like a crackling bonfire, that she had given a little involuntary shiver from her head to her toes and thought about making another baby with him.

Only they already had.

With Harry she remembers going labor pains starting at around noon on a muggy, overcast July day. This baby is due the same month, but her water breaks an entire week early, at the end of June. It also breaks in the middle of the night, leaving her with soaked sheets and a long waddle across the field to Petunia, who is displeased to be woken up, given how light a sleeper Dudley is, but even more displeased that Lily doesn’t intend to go to a hospital and instead wants to owl for a midwife.

“Women still die in labor all the time, you know,” she says snidely after the message is sent, but is silenced by one look from Lily, and begrudgingly sets her up in the spare bedroom, which is still a good deal more spacious than her cramped bedroom in the gardener’s cottage. Usually she likes the coziness of it, but now she feels as though her skin is on fire, even with all the upstairs windows open and a cool summer breeze wafting in.

The midwife is a brisk older witch who wastes no time in ordering an affronted Petunia about, secluding Harry and Dudley in the nursery, and in reassuring Lily that her labor will surely be quicker this time around, since it is her second child. 

“It had better be,” Lily says through gritted teeth; she remembers birthing Harry as being a good deal more idyllic than this one, but perhaps that’s just the fog of nostalgia and the fact that they were in hiding. Now there’s nothing to stop her from shrieking her head off with each contraction, and hunching over on her hands and knees in bed, wishing she could give birth in a snowdrift.

But it is a shorter labor, albeit a fiercer one, and she closes her eyes and howls as her second child slithers into the world. Petunia gasps as the midwife catches the infant and towels it off, siphoning mucus from its mouth and nose with a quick spell, and there is a tense beat of silence before a thin, reedy cry, and Lily slumps onto her side, trembling and seeing spots.

“It’s a girl,” the midwife says, pressing the baby to her chest, and Lily glances down at her daughter and laughs breathily. “Of course it is.”

Violet Mary Potter, as she is later named, for Lily’s mother and Mary and Petunia’s middle name, also Mary, is a smaller, more fretful infant than her brother ever was. She has a thinner face and her hair is a shock of dark auburn, not black. Yet she is still the most beautiful creature Lily has ever seen, unphotogenic baby or not. She sees James in her nose and mouth even before her eyes are revealed to be a striking hazel, months later.

She was born at four in the morning, and so for the first seven hours of her life, after the midwife leaves to get some sleep, with a promise to return at noon, it is just Lily and Petunia and the boys there, all piled onto one bed. “Pretty,” says Dudley, who had turned two only a few days before. “Sissy,” Harry proclaims, laying his head beside her and staring intently at her sleeping form.

“Your sissy,” Lily agrees, squeezing his hand. “Our little Vi.”

Petunia is quiet for once, before she says hoarsely, “It’s a good name.”

“Better than Harry?” Lily can’t help but tease, even with the dark shadows under her eyes and the pain and the tingling of her scar, because she can’t help but remember the burning right now.

Petunia just huffs and looks away for a moment, before she turns back, and is almost tender in her look, although maybe it’s just the shadows of the rising sun outside. “Mummy would have loved it. And her.” She hesitates, and then adds, in a voice barely above a whisper, “And she would have liked James quite a bit too.” 

Lily can count on one hand the number of times Petunia has ever referred to him by name. “She would have,” she agrees, resting her head back against the beaten down pillows. She wants to close her eyes and rest for a little while and know that when she wakes, he won’t be here, but a part of him will be, and she can feel his heartbeat pulsing steadily with two fingers in a fragile red chest.


	10. Chapter 10

Lily wakes up panting from a nightmare on Halloween, four months after Violet is born. For a few moments she can’t remember the nightmare at all, and then she sees James’ corpse beside her in bed. For a moment he is waveringly real, in the half-light of the just-before-dawn sky outside the window, and then he collapses into the sheets and is gone. Lily curls up where he was and buries her face in the pillow. She has taken to using some of his old shirts as pillowcases, so she can still smell him. But maybe that’s just making the dreams more real.

As if on cue, Violet stirs in her crib and begins to fuss and twitch. Harry sleeps on, oblivious, wedged on the side of her bed. Now that his crib is his little sister’s, Lily has taken to having him sleep in her own bed. She can’t stand the idea of not being able to reach out and touch him. She sits in the growing light on the foot of the bed and feeds her daughter, hair brushing her shoulders now. She wants to cut it again soon; she doesn’t like the idea of having long hair and two babies. 

There has been talk of holding a memorial on this day for years to come, to honor the end of the war and those who were lost. Lily doesn’t want a memorial. She doesn’t want to remember. She’s spent the past year having to remember every single second of every single day. She wants her husband back. She wants her life back. When they were trapped in Godric’s Hollow, she hated it. Their home became a cage. She would do anything to be in that cage again. She’s free now, but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s no ‘moving on’. She has two children. 

She was very depressed for three months after Harry was born. The baby blues, her mum would have called it. It could have been that, or it could have been the fact that they were in hiding from a group of murderers. But really Lily thinks it was not so much the danger and the tension but the fact that for once, things were not going as she had expected, and not in a good way. She’d always welcomed change, always loved surprises. She wasn’t like Petunia, wasn’t like the rest of her family, didn’t believe she clung to normalcy.

The unexpected thrilled her, it always had. She hadn’t been frightened when she was informed she was a witch, first by Severus, then by McGonagall. She’d been overjoyed. She’d been excited. She was special. She wasn’t weird, she wasn’t a freak, she wasn’t overreacting or being dramatic or hysterical. She was right. She was different, she was better, she was meant for something more than Little Whinging.

She never said it aloud, but of course she felt superior. She didn’t suddenly hate her parents, look down on her sister, but she felt vindicated, and there was some spite in the mix. It was as if she’d won a prize for something no one else had been paying attention to or believed in. She was going places they could not follow. Once she’d gotten to Hogwarts and reality had set in, that she was just another anonymous first year witch there, that she was talented but not some prodigy, then she had calmed down, then she had been humbled, had realized.

It was why James had always irked her so. Because deep down, some sliver of her had been just like him. Arrogant and overconfident and callous when it came to her own pride, her own ambitions. Of course she had ambitions. She wasn’t a hatstall, but that didn’t mean the Hat had never whispered ‘you could be great’ in her ear. She hadn’t rejected Slytherin outright, but she hadn’t been aiming for it either. Had Snape come before Evans, she might have, and then things could have been very, very different. In the end, on a whim, it elevated her chivalry over her cunning. Lily had always played fair, after all. But that didn’t mean she’d never been tempted.

Still, she had welcomed a new life with open, eager arms. She hadn’t looked back when she’d boarded the train, and while she’d been homesick, had written to her mum and dad, had always come home for the holidays… She’d never had any regrets. Her father had been proud but she knew her mother had never gotten over her unease about it. The sense that ‘her Lily’ had somehow changed irrevocably, had been replaced by a girl who didn’t ask permission anymore, who waltzed through life to music the rest of them couldn’t hear.

Even her relationship with James had been an unexpected boon. She hadn’t intended to fall in love with him. She’d always been a romantic, but she hadn’t intended to fall for anyone at all. But then he was there, filling up more and more of her time, of her thoughts, until she couldn’t even contemplate the idea of not being with him, of not having him. James had a jealous streak, but Lily had been the truly possessive one. Not controlling, but greedy with his affection, his attention. She loved the way he looked at her so much, loved the way he felt, that she never wanted him to look away or let go. 

And then there had been Harry. Her entire pregnancy she had put on a happy face, and she had been happy, truly, because James was happy, because they needed to be united on this, because she couldn’t give in to all the whispers and murmurs that they were on a suicide mission for going through with it. She had to be strong and she had to love the idea of a child and she did want to meet him, want to see his face, trace his eyes and mouth with her fingers.

And then he was there and the bubble had burst after the initial giddy shock of cradling a newborn in her arms, of the concept of a son, that she had created this little being. And there were days and then weeks and then months of backlash on her part. Was this what she wanted? What sort of life was he going to have? How could they have done this? Who would bring a child into a world like theirs? It was cruel, it was thoughtless, it was immoral. 

She’d imagined Harry older, imagined him enraged, furious with her her, not forgiving her, never forgiving her for what she and James had done, for making him, for birthing him into a world tearing itself apart, one that wanted to swallow him whole and spit out his bones. She’d felt so guilty. Guilty for having him, and guilty for not wanting him now, and guilty for a future she couldn’t predict, and guilty for feeling the way she did. 

It had passed. It had, eventually, as most things in life do. The feelings had eased and drifted away, and Harry had charmed her as much as James ever had. And so now she wasn’t in a panic with Violet, wasn’t wracked with (as much) guilt, because she’d felt these things before. She knew what it was, knew her own mind. She was older, not much older, but certainly wiser. She felt guilty and sad and angry and apathetic, but it would pass. But it didn’t matter. It would pass but she would always want to go back. She would always be living in reverse, always glancing over her shoulder, always expecting to see James round a corner or sit down beside her or lie next to her in bed. Her children were going to grow up with a mother who stayed on the edges of their lives, on the peripheral, loving and kind and patient, yes, but never truly there, never fully engaged, desperately wishing she could be seventeen one more time. Just one more day. One more hour. 

She’s scrabbling at a locked door that can never be opened. No one can pass through it. It’s gone. The entrance to the cave was walled up. The stairs collapsed behind her. The mirror shattered and the cracks are marring her reflection. Lily knows this. She was always praised for being insightful, for seeing the bigger picture, for thinking in the long term. Wide open thoughts like a grassy meadow. Now it’s all compressed into this small warm room with its small dusty window and the toddler in her bed and the infant at her breast.

They don’t really acknowledge that it’s All Hallows Eve. They’re not in a muggle neighborhood and Harry is too young to be running around collecting candy. She’s not sure if she’ll ever take him out on this night. But she doesn’t want to stay in either, so she ends up depositing the children with Petunia, who has recently found secretarial work in the nearest town, a dentist’s office. Her sister is not thrilled at the idea of wrangling two toddler and a four month old for the evening, but she does not say a word about it.

Lily shrugs on her long coat and apparates directly to the cemetery. The sun has recently set and there is the very faint sound of children shouting and playing a few streets away. At the far end of the graveyard she can just make out the figures of a few teenagers smoking by the wrought iron gate. She kicks up dead leaves and treads the familiar path to James’ grave. She has only brought Harry and Violet here once, this past summer. Harry has long since stopped asking for his father, but she’s not sure if he understands that this is where Da is now.

They wanted a monument of some kind, but she declined. The McKinnons deserve a monument. Dorcas Meadowes deserves a monument. The Longbottoms deserve a monuments. The Bones family. The Prewett brothers. James is not a hero, he is hers. You can’t love a hero, not really, can’t touch him, can’t feel him, can’t want him. He doesn’t belong to the world, he belongs to her. She buried his body, she bore his children, he is hers to do with as she pleases.

And it pleases her to sit by his grave and drink. Which she does. And when she closes her eyes she can pretend she is sipping smuggled fire whiskey with him under the quidditch stands, that they are kissing sloppily, hastily, as if they’re about to be torn away from each other. This was before they were ‘serious’, before they were James-and-Lily all together, to everyone. They were two separate beasts at that point, doing what beasts do. Tasting each other. She loved to kiss him, loved his lips, loved snarling her fingers in his hair and pulling until he tipped his head back and groaned so sweetly. 

His hand was up the back of her blouse, nails scratching at her neck, and they were whispering pleas and threats and promises in each other’s ears and mouths. When they broke apart she’d stared at him and smiled and taken another swig from the bottle. “I thought you weren’t that type of girl,” he’d teased gently, holding her hand like a lovestruck little boy. She’d licked her lips and watched him lick his, her perfect mirror image. “You don’t know what type of anything I am,” she’d boasted, and he’d laughed and laughed.

Time to seems to blur together and suddenly she can’t hear the children playing anymore or smell the teens’ smoke. Someone is standing beside her, throwing her limp arm over their shoulder. “James,” Lily sighs in relief, and lets her head drop onto his shoulder. “You came.” He picks her up, and she starts to cry, because it has to be a dream. 

“Lily,” Sirius sighs, and she cries all the harder.

He takes her home to the gardener’s cottage, and holds back her hair the way he used to hold back Marlene’s at parties, while she vomits into the toilet, knees shaking. She tries to get out words, but they’re encased with bile and spit, so she just wretches and coughs and sobs instead. “I’m staying to make sure you don’t choke on sick and suffocate in your sleep,” he tells her, after tucking her into bed.

“You sound like Remus,” she murmurs into her damp pillow case.

He pets her hair the way one might an unfamiliar car. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Lil.”

In the morning, when she wakes with a pounding headache and a dry, battered throat, she walks into the kitchen to find Sirius and Petunia moments away from a butter knife stabbing, while Remus feeds Violet a bottle and Harry stands on the counter top, trying to get his box of cereal down himself. They all turn and stare at her as she stands in the doorway, and the cereal topples over and spills all over the floor.

She does not remember James until ten minutes later. It is the longest she has ever gone.


End file.
